When they came into St. Louis the Dodgers had a ten-and-a-half game lead. When they took off for Pittsburgh they left three games of that lead and Pete Reiser behind them. In the twelfth inning, with no score and two outs, Enos Slaughter had hit one off Whit Wyatt.
"It was over my head," Pete said once when I asked him about that one, "and I took off. I caught it and missed that flagpole by two inches and hit the wall and dropped the ball. That's the only one I ever dropped, but I had the instinct to throw it to Peewee Reese, and we just missed gettin' Slaughter at the plate, and they won, 1-0. I made one step to start off the field and I woke up the next morning in St. John's Hospital. My head was bandaged, and I had an awful headache."
"Look, Pete," Dr. Robert Hyland told him, "I'm your personal friend. I'm advising you not to play any more baseball this year."
After two days Pete took the bandage off his head and got up. The room, he said, started to spin, but he dressed and sneaked out past the nursing station. He took a train to Pittsburgh and went to the ball park.
"Leo saw me," he said, "and he said, 'Go get your uniform on, Pistol.' I said, 'Not tonight, Skipper.' Leo said, 'Aw, I'm not gonna let you hit. I want these guys to see you. It'll give 'em that little spark they need. Besides, it'll change the pitching plans on that other bench when they see you in uniform.' "
In the fourteenth inning the Dodgers had a runner on second and Ken Heintzelman, the left-hander, came in for the Pirates. He walked Johnny Rizzo, and Durocher had run out of pinch-hitters.
"Damn," he was saying, walking up and down in the dugout. "I want to win this one. Who can I use? Anybody here who can hit?"
Pete walked up to the bat rack. He pulled out his stick.
"You got yourself a hitter," he said to Leo.
He walked up there and hit a line drive over the second baseman's head that was good for three bases. The two runs scored and Pete rounded first base and collapsed.
"When I woke up I was in the hospital again," he told me. "I could just make out that somebody was standing there and then I saw it was Leo. He said, 'You awake?' I said, 'Yep.' He said, 'By God, we beat 'em! How do you feel?' I said, 'How do you think I feel?' He said, Aw, you're better with one leg and one eye than anybody else I've got.' I said, Yeah, and that's the way I'll end up —on one leg and with one eye."
He still hit .310 for the season, but he said he figured that he lost the pennant for the Dodgers that year, when the Cardinals beat them out on the last two days. He suffered with dizzy spells a lot of the time, and he had trouble judging fly balls. Once at Ebbets Field, when Mort Cooper was pitching for the Cardinals, Pete was seeing two baseballs coming up there, and Babe Pinelli, who was umpiring behind the plate, stopped the game twice to ask him if he was all right.
"How are you today?" I said on the phone now the second morning.
"Better," he said, and I could hear that a TV was on in his room.
"You sound it," I said, although I could still hear his breathing.
"Yeah," he said. "Why don't you come over in the afternoon?"
He had a small private room at the end of the hall. The head of the bed was elevated, and he was in one of those hospital gowns, a sheet up to his waist. He was bald and heavier under the sheet and the oval face was fuller and he needed a shave.
"Bronchial pneumonia they call it," he said, speaking as he exhaled. "I can't breathe. I had an attack in 1970. In Palm Springs. In spring training. I been getting them on and off once a year. Now three times a year. This is the third. They're worried because each time the heart murmur shows up. That time in Kokomo it was a strained heart muscle. In '64 I had a heart attack. I also got a hiatus hernia. I can't make quick moves any more."
Quick moves. In the outfield he was so quick that he seemed to get his start on the ball in that almost infinitesimal part of a second as it came off the bat. On the base paths he was a burner. In 1946 he led the league when he stole thirty-four bases, thirteen more than the runner-up, Johnny Hopp of the Braves. That year he also set a major league record when he stole home seven times.
"Eight times," he told me once. "In Chicago I stole home and Magerkurth hollered, 'You're out!' Then he dropped his voice and he said, 'I'll be a sonofabitch, I missed it.' He'd already had his thumb in the air. I had eight for eight."
Rod Carew tied that in 1969, but I doubt that anyone will ever tie or top the way Pete did it, because that was another year when he was in and out of Peck Memorial Hospital. He was knocked out making a diving catch. He ripped the muscles in7his left leg beating out an infield hit. He broke his left leg sliding. He broke his collar bone, and he dislocated his left shoulder. With all that he led the league in stolen bases and set that record.
"We're playing the Cards," he told me once, "and Whitey Kurowski hit one in the seventh inning at Ebbets Field. "I dove for it and woke up in the clubhouse. I held the ball, but I was in Peck Memorial for four days. It really didn't take much to knock me out in those days. I was coming apart all over. When I dislocated my left shoulder they popped it back in, and Leo said, 'You'll be all right. You don't throw with it anyway.' "
That was the year the Dodgers tied with the Cardinals for the pennant and lost the play-off. Pete wasn't there for those two games. He was in Peck Memorial again.
"I'd pulled a charley horse in my left leg," he told me. "It's the last two weeks of the season, and I'm out for four days. We're playing the Braves, and the winning run is on third with two out in the ninth, and Leo sends me up. He says, 'If you don't hit it good, don't hurt your leg.'
"The first pitch was a knockdown and, when I ducked, the ball hit the bat and went down the third base line, as beautiful a bunt as you've ever seen. Well, Ebbets Field is jammed. Leo has said, 'Don't run.' But this is a big game. I take off for first, and we win and I've ripped the muscles from my ankle to my hip. Leo says, 'You shouldn't have done it.'
"Now it's the last three days of the season, and we're ahead of the Cards and we're playing the Phillies in Brooklyn. Leo says to me, 'It's now or never. I don't think we can win it without you.' I said, 'I don't feel good, but I'll try.' The first two up are outs, and I single to right. There's Charley Dressen, coaching on third, with the steal sign. He knows I've got a bad leg. I start to get my lead, and a pitcher named Charley Schanz is working and he throws an ordinary lob over to first. My leg is stiff and I slide and my heel spike catches the bag and I hear it snap.
"Leo comes running out. He says, 'Come on. You're all right.' I said, 'I think it's broken.' He says, 'It ain't stickin' out.' They took me to Peck Memorial, and it was broken."
"I had a bit of a time finding you," I was telling him now. "When I talked with you on the phone, I got it that you were staying at something called the Downtowner Motel. There isn't any."
"It's the Uptowner," he said exhaling the words again, rasping them. "Downtowner. Uptowner. I thought I said Uptowner."
"That solves that," I said.
He had started to cough. He reached for a gauze wipe and coughed into that and dropped it into the waste basket with a plastic bag liner in it.
"I was supposed to have a breathing treatment at noon," he said, "and they're not here yet."
"Listen," I said. "If this is hard on you and you'd rather rest, I'll come back tomorrow. We don't have to talk now."
"That's all right," he said. "I'd rather talk."
I knew he had been a coach with the Dodgers, after they had moved to Los Angeles. Then he had been a coach with the Cubs, after Durocher had taken over as manager.
"The last thing I remember reading about you," I said, "was when you were carted off the field again after some kind of rhubarb."
"In '73," he said. "In Candlestick Park. There was a big scrap at home plate. I went up to separate Bonds and Hundley. Somebody gave me a karate shot. Broke my collar bone. Somebody hit me on the head. Knocked me out. I went down and got spiked. I think that's what broke up the fight. They saw I'm on the ground, and they're steppin' on me."
J
ust the thought of it made me uncomfortable, and I was aware that I was wincing. How, with his medical history, could he go near a scramble like that, even as a peacemaker? He never shied from a wall, though, or a pitched ball or anything that his instinct asked that once-remarkable body to do.
After that catch he made on Culley Rickard, when Butch Henline found the ball in his glove and in the clubhouse they called for the doctor who sent for the priest, he was in Peck Memorial for three weeks. For the first ten days he couldn't move, but when they let him out he made the next western trip with the Dodgers. In Pittsburgh he was working out in the outfield before the game when Clyde King, chasing a fungo, ran into him. He woke up in the clubhouse and he went back to the Hotel Schenley and lay down. He had dinner with Peewee Reese, and later they were sitting on the porch and he scratched his head and felt a lump there.
"Gosh," he said. "I don't think that's supposed to be like that."
"Hell, no," Reese said.
They flew him to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where they operated on him for the blood clot. They told him that if it had moved just a little more, he would have been gone. He was unable to hold even a pencil. He had double vision and when he tried to take a single step, became dizzy. He stayed for three weeks and then went home for almost a month.
"It was August," he told me, "and Brooklyn was fighting for another pennant. I thought if I could play the last two months it might make the difference, so I went back to Johns Hopkins. The doctor said, 'You've made a remarkable recovery.' I said, 'I want to play.' He said, 'I can't okay that. The slightest blow on the head can kill you.' "
Knowing that, he played. He worked out for four days, pinch hit a couple of times and then, in the Polo Grounds, made a diving catch in left field. They carried him off again, and in the clubhouse he was unable to recognize anyone.
He was still having dizzy spells when the Dodgers went into that 1947 World Series against the Yankees. In the third game he walked in the first inning, got the steal sign and, when he slid into second, he felt his right ankle snap. At the hospital they found it was broken.
"Just tape it, will you?" Pete said.
"I want to put a cast on it," the doctor said.
"If you do," Pete said, "they'll give me a dollar-a-year contract for next season."
The next day he was back on the bench at Ebbets Field. Bill Bevens was pitching for the Yankees, and Pete was to put a postscript onto one of the most memorable of World Series games. Bevens had given up a run on walks, but with two out in the ninth and the Yankees leading, 2-1, he was one out away from pitching what would have been the first no-hitter in World Series history.
"Aren't you going to volunteer to hit?" Burt Shotton, who was managing Brooklyn, said to Pete. He and Pete had never hit it off since the day in 1937 when Shotton was managing Springfield and he threw Pete out of camp. Shotton told him he would never be a ballplayer, and Pete was eighteen then, and he said the tears were rolling out of his eyes.
Al Gionfriddo was on second now, with another walk and a stolen base, and Bucky Harris, who was managing the Yankees, ordered Pete walked. Eddie Miksis ran for him, and when Cookie Lavagetto hit that double the two runs scored and Brooklyn won, 3-2. In a World Series game, in which not only a win but a no-hitter hung in the balance, a man with a broken ankle, who didn't dare confess it to his own ballclub because he knew they wouldn't credit him on his next contract for past favors, was intentionally walked for what became the winning run.
"I gave up coaching in the big leagues," he was saying now, "so I wouldn't have to travel so much. I have to be near home."
A nurse had come in. She handed him a pill and a paper cup of water and he sat up and, after he had popped the pill into his mouth and followed it with the water, she gave him a medicinal dose in a small bottle and he swallowed that. When she had left I asked him about the rookie program that had brought him to Florida.
"We get these high school and college kids we sign," he said, and I had to listen carefully to get the words. "We've got fifteen Cubs and fifteen Mets here. It's a forty-five-day extension of spring training. For the rookie league that starts in June. It's forty-five more games experience."
"What are these kids like who come up today?" I said.
"You get all kinds," he said.
"You don't think the world is going down the drain because of the younger generation?"
"Hell, no," he said, stopping for breath. "I see too many good ones. It's so much easier to write about kids doing bad things, than about kids doing good things for others."
He had paused again. I didn't think I should keep this going, but he seemed to want to talk.
"There's a lot of stinkers in the world," he said. "And it's a damn shame. I think if they'd put in some juvenile laws with teeth in them, so the police and parents can hit a few butts, it'd be better. Too many come in the third time, because they never served the first two times."
He started to cough into a gauze wipe again.
"This coughing tires you out," he said, pausing. "I was supposed to have a breathing treatment at noon. But she ain't here yet. I must have had the button on for three hours last night. I said, 'I'm sure glad I'm not dying.' She said, You're not the only patient on the floor.' One of them says, 'Aren't you keeping your record of your intake?' I said, 'I'm not supposed to write that down. You are.' "
"That oxygen there," I said, pointing to the tubing on the stand. "I'm not trying to play doctor, but does it work?"
"Yeah, if you can plug it into the wall there," he said. "I can hardly breathe."
I plugged it in and handed it to him. He put the nasal cannula into his nostrils and lay back, breathing from it. After a minute or so he handed it back to me.
"If I leave it in too long," he said, "my sinuses get worse."
I placed it back on the stand. He was breathing a little easier now.
"When I wrote about you managing in Kokomo," I said, "I told about the time one of your kids had made a bad throw. You asked him what he was thinking while the ball was coming to him, and he said, "I was thinking to myself that I hope I don't make a bad throw."
"That's right," he said.
"Then you told him how, when you were playing, you used to be saying, 'Hit it to me. Just hit it to me. I'll make the catch. I'll make the throw. Give me the steal again. Give me the sign. I'll go!'"
"That's right," he said. "You have to think positive. I try to tell them that."
"So after the story ran," I said, "I got a letter from a father. He said he had sat his own kid down and he'd read that to him, and he thanked me. I wrote him back, saying that I appreciated his letter but that he shouldn't thank me. He should thank Pete Reiser."
"You try to tell these kids," he said, "and one of them said to me, T didn't know you played major league ball.' "
"That's awful," I said. "It hurts me to hear that."
"Any manager in the National League," Arthur Patterson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune during Pete's rookie year, "would give up his best man to obtain Pete Reiser. On every bench they're talking about him. Rival players watch him take his cuts during batting practice, announce when he's going to make a throw to the plate or third during outfield drill. They just whistle their amazement when he scoots down the first base line on an infield dribbler or a well-placed bunt."
"How many guys," Tom Meany, who wrote baseball for more than three decades, said one day, watching Pete, "does God make like this?"
Not many. When he was with Elmira in '39 he made a throw and heard something pop. His arm was broken, and after they had cut into him and reset it at Johns Hopkins, he carried it in a cast for three months. A month later he played ten games as a left-handed outfielder until Dr. George Bennett, who had operated on him, heard about it and stopped him. That winter in St. Louis he bowled, using first one arm and then the other. In the back yard he practiced throwing a rubber ball left-handed against a wall, and then he went to Fairgrounds Park and worked on the long throw, left-hande
d, with a baseball. When he arrived at the Dodgers camp in Clearwater that spring he could throw as well with his left arm as he could with his right.
"Then you run into some kids," he was saying now, "who are hero-worshippers. They tell you everything about you until you wish they'd shut up."
"On the way to the airport in Miami the other day," I said, "I had a cabbie from Brooklyn who still remembers you. He said, 'Pete Reiser? They put the padding on the walls there for him.' "
"I still get quite a lot of mail from Brooklyn," he said. "People tell me their grandfathers talk about me. They send me some of the oldest looking pictures. I don't know where they get 'em. Old pictures on newer type of paper. They must be selling them at the Mets stadium and Yankee Stadium."
He had paused again, breathing heavily.
"They send baseballs to be signed," he said. "I had one not long ago with the names of about thirty batting champions. That has to be a collector's item."
"Was it insured?" I said.
"It didn't come insured," he said. "It came in like an old burlap bag with the label on, and one inside to mail back. It was from eastern Connecticut or Pennsylvania. There's a guy in Pennsylvania you hear from twice a year. He's always got something for you to sign. He must spend a fortune. They send bats to sign. It's easy to get your address. There's an organization that sells 'em."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 48